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How will it change organizations? How will it affect the global society?
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January 7, 2008

Social Innovation: Investing $$$ in New Ideas

CONSCIOUS LIFESTYLE OFFERS $1,000 TO STUDENTS WITH SOCIALLY INNOVATIVE IDEAS

January 7, 2007

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT—Conscious Lifestyle, a nonprofit organization concerned with socially responsible consumerism, is now accepting grant applications from high school and college students. Students who exhibit interest and commitment to social entrepreneurship and consumer responsibility in areas such as socially human rights, animal welfare, and environmentalism will receive up to $1,000, web space, and other pertinent resources to complete projects of their choosing. In the past, such projects have included:

• An environmental organization that converted school vehicles to run on biodiesel.
• A socially responsible product-design firm run by engineering students, which provides high-quality services for nonprofit organizations at affordable prices.
• A initiative committed to socially responsible investing on campus.

Students with similarly innovative ideas should download an application from www.consciouslifestyle.org/2008ventureapp and submit it by February 15, 2008. Winners will be chosen by an executive committee of Conscious Lifestyle staff members and announced April 1.

Today’s students are passionate about addressing societal problems, and they want to make sure their hard work will lead to long-lasting change. Fortunately for these students, Conscious Lifestyle has created a program to support their efforts.

Conscious Lifestyle is a non-profit organization that empowers students and schools to be more socially responsible. With a strong emphasis on social entrepreneurship, Conscious Lifestyle trains high school and university students to make lasting contributions to their schools and fellow students. For more information, please visit www.consciouslifestyle.org or call Mike Del Ponte, Executive Director of Conscious Lifestyle at 925-360-4149.

October 22, 2007

Innovation and the Great Global Warming Debate

This is a great article. I like the authors that counter an anticipated perspective based on their status; in his case, as a scientist. I agree with Botkin’s perspective here. Note that the author’s points do not counter any of my other social-intellectual points made earlier.

I too have as much concern for the exaggeration of our isolated focus as I do for my sense that humanity is a major instigator in the break-down of the earth’s eco-system. It reminds me of how humanity clings onto particular points rather than to perceive an ‘ecology’ of relationships. We then make decisions based on a mono-nucleic or single-pointed view, while somehow (unconsciously?) assuming that our choice has integrated all the problems within one neat little package. We are a society that reacts to the immediacy of singled-out emergencies that trigger a fear of our own death, rather than to be responsive to the very real intuitive callings within us, of which by the way actually emphasizes life rather than death. In the global warming case, humanity’s inner ‘call’ is signaling us to change the way we interact with the planet’s resources and life systems. Yet that calling has gotten pulled into an outdated learning methodology that encourages the selection of a certain part within the greater whole so that we can adjust it in order to ‘fix’ the whole, all while dropping the other parts in the process. Ironically, a relatively recent advancement of science through complexity theory; more specifically: the butterfly effect, suggests that we must take into effect sources of small changes too, as they are just as important as the big sources of system change. Thus, it’s the ecology of our science that seems to be lost or forgotten (or maybe still emerging?) right now. In part, I believe this is due to our (also outdated) economic model, which reinforces big payouts of fame and money going to those who come up with the best (so-called) right answer. This is a flaw in today’s human(e) management model and directly impacts scientific progress, even if science theory suggests otherwise. That is, the original science model is based in the separation of matter in order to see how it got put together and works. Although this process is important, I believe that it is valuable only when balanced with other scientific procedures that incorporate (w)holistic applications which seek to understand how a system works as a whole without separating it into parts.

All that said, can the global warming movement trigger an ecology of understanding that is sorely missing? In the name of generating deeper forms of innovation (rather than shallow), this is both my hope and my concern.

Vic

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On 10/17/07 10:09 AM, From Dan J. who wrote:

Another point amongst the discourse on global climate change that leads me to ponder the (science belief=action) model. So is Botkin one of the naysayer conspirators, of the believers but a concerned observer, or just misguided? What should we believe about the truth from this? He's reputable enough to get into the WSJ, but then that paper has a pro-business bias.

So having read this, what do you make of his factual points? What will you do with it within your social-intellectual construct of climate change?

Dan

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Global Warming Delusions

10/17/2007 The Wall Street Journal
By Daniel B. Botkin

Mr. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of ”Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century” (Replica Books, 2001).

Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life -- ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20%-30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming -- a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age -- saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.

July 9, 2007

Sustainable Innovation and Innovation for Sustainability

A corporation's organizational framework must facilitate and encourage employee innovation and risk-taking. Frequently, integral decision making must occur at lower employee levels where people have the greatest information on products, markets, customer feed.wholesysteminnovation.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/60"
dc:title="Cultural Creatives: The New Innovators"
dc:identifier="http://www.wholesysteminnovation.com/blog/2007/04/social_entrepreneurs_take_inno.php"
dc:subject="Social Entrepreneurship"
dc:description="Rebecca St. Martin has started a great network called the 'Cultural Creatives Network'. This periferal concept is now heading for business center stage - otherwise known as "Social Entreprenuership". Thank you Rebecca for helping to create the next level of..."
dc:creator=""
dc:date="2007-04-18T19:12:17-08:00" />
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I doubt I've ever met an entrepreneur who wasn't also creative. Being able to envision a way out of the rat race alone requires creativity -- not to mention the creativity needed to manifest a new source of income.

But what is the relationship between the Creative Entrepreneur and the Cultural Creative Entrepreneur?

Qualities of an Entrepreneur

Robert T. Kiyosaki, author of Before You Quit Your Job, explores what qualities people need to successfully transition from employee to entrepreneur-- and from entrepreneur to business leader.

Kiyosaki's main ideas are:

1. A successful entrepreneur finds the right idea, the right people to act on the idea and the right money to leverage the project.
2. A successful entrepreneur operates from freedom and opportunity rather than security and resources.
3. The best time to answer the tough questions about starting a business is before starting the business. Some of these questions are:

a. How badly do I want my own business and why?
b. How much will I extend myself to succeed?
c. Am I afraid to fail? If so, how can I make this a strength?
d. Am I willing to educate myself on the essential components of a successful business?

An Entrepreneur Plus Cultural Creative Values = A Social Entrepreneur
Cultural Creative entrepreneurs, more often referred to as social entrepreneurs, are those entrepreneurs who focus on creating innovations and inventions that improve life for everyone.

Bill Drayton of Ashoka, an organization dedicated to supporting and promoting social entrepreneurship as well as transforming the face of social innovation, points out that social entrepreneurs "are not content just to give a fish...or to teach someone how to fish. [Social entrepreneurs] will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry."

April 17, 2007

A Call For Innovation: The Failure of Technology

Innovation carries many assumptions. All of us carry an underlying set of beliefs. For example: We often assume that because we can make it and it holds high potential for monetary profit that someonen will make it. Why is this usually the case? The idea of technical innovation being left unmonitored at the design stage can carry dangerous results without necessary check systems.

I propose that we use a cross-over model for creating and assessing innovation: 1-social innovation, 2-organizational innovation, and 3-technical innovation. Each carries their own weight in terms of being able to create cool stuff - to innovate. However, when actively used and considered together at the same time during an innovation process, the triad relationship can help to monitor each other's outcomes by helping the core stakeholders of the innovation to make better decisions. Otherwise, to release an innovative idea that has no interplay such as this, the outcome of an innovation may end up to be detrimental.

Here is an example:

The bees are dying ...
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.Loss of brain cells in children ...
Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.

This situation is serious and points directly to the idea of "Sustainable Innovation" processes. Are cell phones the culprit? Don't know yet. But it sure seems to me that something was missing during the innovation stage of this product. What might it be?

......

Here's an interesting update on this issue:

Organic Bees Are Thriving While commercial bee populations are plummeting. What's with that? Seems it may not be cell RF but pesicides. The same question arises: Something was missing during the innovation stage of pesticide products. What might it be?

April 15, 2007

What is the Color of Innovation? It's 'GREEN'

This landmark article by Thomas Friedman is on how the U.S. can retake its role as a global leader and address the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature, and terrorism. Think there may be a need for new forms of innovation here? : )

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The Power of Green
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (video: meet the man)
Published in New York Times: April 15, 2007

Excerpts from article ...

"... The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street — thanks to the perfect storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and the third flattened the global economic playing field. The convergence of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions about “green” upside down in a very short period of time, making it much more compelling to many more Americans.

But here’s the bad news: While green has hit Main Street — more Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call “Geo-Greens” to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green ideology — green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we’re fooling ourselves. We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years. ...

April 12, 2007

California: How the Golden State Went Green

The dreams of tiny Catalina are, in many ways, the embodiment of what California as a whole hopes to achieve. While the Bush administration in Washington has preferred to kowtow to the short-term interests of the big energy companies and flirt with those who would deny that global warming poses any threat at all, the Golden State has taken matters into its own hands.

Indeed, California has, almost single-handedly, pushed the debate forward across the United States. Since 2005, when he issued his first executive order establishing emission reduction targets over the next half-century, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has staked much of his reputation and legacy on finding ways to roll back the effects of global warming.

April 6, 2007

Innovation Gender">Innovation Generated Through Ecological Management

Here is a book that provides an excellent framework for extracting unusual forms of innovation within your company. Below I have posted the book's content, which includes insights on the future of business and checklists for tranforming your company's operations into a sustainable enterprise.

'Ecomanagement: The Elmwood Guide to Ecological Auditing and Sustainable Business'

How to plan a full ecological audit based on business, personnel, organizational, human, and psychological considrerations. Checklists dealing with questions of implementation with suggestions on how to set priorities.

Innovation Through Community Collaboration

Below is a concept that validates a vision that I had 15 years ago: The vision was that innovation will no longer be based on IP rights (intellectual property). Instead, inventions will emerge in an open, collaborative, non-secretive way. Of course this is an ideal world - as least for me. However, the concept of innovation ownership and the idea that 'real' innovation only shows up in the bellies of R&D labs, is rapidly fading. Read up below ...

Wikinomics is a new term for harnessing mass collaboration for innovation, growth and profit. The term was coined by Don Tapscott, author of "Paradigm Shift" and "The Digital Economy," and is the title of his newest book. Mass collaboration has created notable breakthroughs like Wikipedia, an encyclopedia with a million authors that's 12 times larger than Britannica; an operating system, Linux; and 150,000 open source applications projects. Mass collaboration means each is constantly updated, revised and corrected by unpaid volunteers. "It's an amazing thing how this organism brings out the antibodies to attack a virus," Tapscott says. The winds of mass collaboration are also changing the way corporations innovate. About five years ago, Tapscott points out, P&G was struggling and its market value had plunged. New CEO A.G. Lafley decided to open the company's R&D to outsiders, tapping their expertise to supplement P&G's staff scientists. Result: P&G is developing deep expertise in what Tapscott calls Wikinomics. "Rather than the 'Not Invented Here' syndrome, P&G has this thing called PFE: 'Proudly Found Elsewhere.' You'd think they'd be threatened by that, but in they actually encourage their researchers to go outside and look for innovations." P&G has even set up reward systems so that their researchers benefit from innovation occurring. They don't have to develop it themselves to reap the rewards. (TomPeters.com)

Read the full interview with Don Tapscott at Tom Peter's blog site. Especially note in the interview that a new approach to creating and/or aquiring innovation has emerged called Innocentive. InnoCentive® is a web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe. It provides an online forum enabling major companies to reward scientific innovation through financial incentives.

April 5, 2007

Innovation Emerges as Global Transformation and Action

One of inKNOWvate's guiding frameworks is the triad model for innovation that seeks to balance the outcomes of innovation. This triad seeks to balance social, technical, & organizational forms of innovation. Using this 3-lens perspective, one can balance and monitor effectiveness with efficiency in solutions that emerge. Below is one of the most prevailing applications of this model: SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP, which is becoming a hot movement in world of innovation.

A growing array of apparently insoluble socio-economic, environmental, and governance challenges presses in on decision-makers — including climate change, the risk of global pandemics, the growing threat to natural resources like water and fisheries, and the ever-present issues of poverty and hunger. Growing Opportunity — the first in an annual series of surveys conducted by SustainAbility in partnership with The Skoll Foundation — explores the potential for more entrepreneurial solutions to such challenges.

Introduction
In today’s business climate there are several forces intersecting in such a way as to create a tension that puts business executives, managers and employees into situations where they face an ethical dilemma. This dilemma could be summarized by the following question:

How do we do the right thing while at the same time balance the needs of all our stakeholders (investors, employees, customers and suppliers)? What is the right thing to do?

The recent events involving Enron, MCI/Worldcom, Global Crossing, Quest, Arther Andersen, and Tyco, (to name just a few) are examples of the negative consequences of actions taken by executives that face this dilemma.

These actions and the resulting surge of policies and public outcry to rebuild the faith in business and business people have created the conditions for what we call an emerging global ethic. This white paper explores the concept of this emerging global business ethic and the link between this ethic and innovation.

March 21, 2007

Creative Sustainability: How to Catalyze Innovation

In today's world, Porritt believes an organisation's cerebral creativity must be grounded in operational creativity to make ideas happen. Necessity is the mother of invention, but if desire is the real driver of human behaviour and creativity, then the necessary has to be made desirable before any kind of change becomes possible. Learning to articulate the essence of human-ness in and through nature is what creativity means to Porritt. It is through the gathering of collective ideas that technologies and processes are shaped - groups of people taking the time and space to meet to share ideas, experiments, dreams and experiences.

"You cannot make soup without water. But a bowl of water is not a bowl of soup. It is what you add to the water that gives the 'value' of soup". Edward de Bono, the father of thinking about thinking, argues that there is no substitute for business competence, efficiency and cost control. But more than this, every business has to deliver a 'value' to customers, just like soup has to deliver a value. Designing these values requires creativity and new ideas. In his essay he argues passionately that businesses need to treat creativity as seriously as they treat capital, labour, machinery and IT.

Creative Sustainability: How to Catalyze Innovation

In today's world Porritt believes an organisation's cerebral creativity must be grounded in operational creativity to make ideas happen. Necessity is the mother of invention, but if desire is the real driver of human behaviour and creativity, then the necessary has to be made desirable before any kind of change becomes possible. Learning to articulate the essence of human-ness in and through nature is what creativity means to Porritt. It is through the gathering of collective ideas that technologies and processes are shaped - groups of people taking the time and space to meet to share ideas, experiments, dreams and experiences.

November 9, 2006

Ecological Design Principles

Principles of Regenerative Commerce

Domains of Community Development and Innovation

Regenerative Commerce is a system that is based on a broader understanding of what it means to develop technology and business. inKNOWvate proposes that, using these principles, a region's economic system can revitalize itself and perform beyond expectation.

Click To Enlarge

The following represent shifts in awareness of the models we use to create and innovate within enterprise. (Note that a shift means we are including new information that expands existing models and does not mean that we are replacing them.

A shift from:

* From Single ... To Triple Bottom Line (3E's) Management (evolved organizing STRUCTURES)

* From Building Mechanistic Systems ... To Growing Living Wholes (advanced technological PATTERN)

inKNOWvate's long term objectives is to create a global network of innovation learning centers for business and community. Each interdependent center will incubate innovative technologies and companies that can work for a post-industrial, globally-conscious society. The concept known as 'Regenerative Commerce' will act as an integrating framework for incorporating principles of sustainable innovation for the realization of business products and services that work for the emerging global community.

November 7, 2006

Permanent Innovation: Design the World

There is an emerging field of design called "geodesign," which is the use of design as a method of dealing with organizational, behavioral, and cultural problems. Since design is in many ways synonymous with innovation, it really means the use of design as a tool to for social innovation.

For example, a project by designer Bruce Mau that is documented in this week's International Herald Tribune is intended to help Guatemalans think positively about their country's future. (The project itself can be found here (in Spanish), although the web site is a bit sparce.

Mau's larger project is called Massive Change, which "explores the legacy and potential, the promise and power of design in improving the welfare of humanity."

November 6, 2006

Living Strategies: Bringing Innovation To Life

As we all know well, the world has changed dramatically since the times when traditional strategic planning first became the foundation on which organizations of all types are based. The landscape on which organizations operated then was relatively predictable, stable, and homogenous. Now it is filled with uncertainty, rapid change, and increasingly diverse players and dynamics. These players not only think and act differently than they used to; they keep changing their minds about what they want and expect from the world around them.

Yet given this dizzying environment in which organizations find themselves, why do so many keep doing strategic planning as if it were still 1960? And even if they have an inspired vision of who they want to be based on their changing environment, how do they create the bridge between their aspirations and the day-to-day operations that members actually experience as the organization?

What organizations need is strategy and a process for creating it that flexes, adapts, and evolves to still make sense in this complex environment, while keeping the organization seamlessly aligned with these strategic dynamics. In other words, they need a “living strategy!”

In a nutshell, living strategy is:

* the dynamic story of the shared aspirations, strategic direction, and strategic outcomes of the organization and the community it supports,
* emerging and continuously evolving
* from the collective knowledge of the community and
* from an expanding network of ongoing strategic conversations among all members of the community around the questions that matter most to them,
* all seamlessly interwoven into the “fabric” of the current organization through a continuous process of reflection and renewal.